Fastly vs Limelight – this is a very important question that many companies looking to implement a content delivery network must ask themselves, as both Fastly and Limelight offer highly effective CDN solutions. These CDN providers both offer high performance web acceleration services and are well equipped to host the most demanding data. If you’re in the market for a CDN solution, it’s important to understand the key differences between these content delivery network providers. In this short article, we’ll look at Fastly vs Limelight to see which content delivery network provider offers the best network and technology, whilst also looking at which companies rely on each provider to accelerate their data.

Fastly vs Limelight: Network

As would be expected of globally successful CDN providers, both Fastly and Limelight have high quality, high performance, worldwide networks, making the Fastly vs Limelight question no easier to answer.

Fastly have developed a network that reaches right across the globe. It already consists of 22 points of presence (PoPs) in global traffic hotspots and some of the world’s largest cities, and there are a further 8 PoPs under construction.

Similarly, Limelight have constructed a network that leverages over 80 points of presence in countries that include the USA, Germany, India, UAE, Korea, Singapore and Japan. This results in over 11 terabits per second of egress capacity, meaning that the Limelight network is one of the most high-performing CDNs in the world.

Fastly vs Limelight: Customers

The quality of Fastly and Limelight’s networks means that they have been chosen by some of the world’s largest companies to accelerate their data.

The key difference between these two CDN providers is the technology used in their CDNs. Fastly have a particularly innovative solution, utilising solid state hard drives (SSDs) in all their servers. This means that data can be retrieved much more quickly than it can be with traditional hard drive, resulting in fast response times when end users request data.

Limelight, on the other hand, has developed proprietary technology that helps to facilitate large scale broadcasting events. Their EdgePrism software, for example, allows live events to be streamed on a huge scale without compromising latency. Furthermore, their EdgeQuery reporting technology constantly monitors audience behaviour to allow data delivery to be customised so that it achieves the best possible performance.